Corvus : a review

I didn't do it justice on National Radio this morning. Not one bit. But listen if you must. Checking in just prior to the review, I was told I had ten minutes (a long time on radio) so I lined up the facts in my head, ringed important notes, firmly marked a place to read from ... but as I was waiting, the NASA astronaut being interviewed before me slipped over the 10.30 a.m mark (talking about being smelly in space!) and then the 10.35 mark, and suddenly ten minutes was just over four. Such a shame, but that's radio for you.

It doesn't always matter - a lesser book can cope with four minutes - but Corvus is one of those books that almost overwhelms a radio reviewer because there's so much to talk about, and that discussion can go in all directions. The book itself is a forest of ripped slips of paper marking extracts that have to be remembered or read out loud (my poor family has patiently listened to most of them). Frankly, it looks like a rook has got to it.

And now I have no time to write up a proper review for my blog because I have to mark short stories and poems by my extramural Massey students. So here are some notes on this glorious book which can be characterised as a memoir about a family that lives with birds not unlike Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. It is also a paean to birds and in fact to all wild creatures, to wilderness, to nature, to the whole of the earth.

Birds, says Woolfson, are indivisible from their environment, unlike humans who have lost that connection over time. Birds are the marker of the health of our environment, too. We may curse them and the way they live cheek by jowl with us in ways that don't always suit our need for control. But, as she says, imagine a world without them, without bird song. What that silence would mean.

Corvus: latin for raven or crow.

Corvids: an order of birds that includes rooks, magpies and crows.

• among the most intelligent, if not the most intelligent, birds - brains the same size and capacity of apes and known by some as 'feathered apes'
• complex social organisation, gregarious
• live cheek-by-jowl with man
• surrounded by superstition (the 'devil's bird'), treated with suspicion and active dislike due to black colouring, being 'hoarse-voiced', cleaned up after battles (carrion) and disaster (Great Fire of London for example) but can't pierce skin with their beaks - need others to do that
• live in rookeries with large, untidy nests
• eat insects, birds eggs, very young birds
• live around the planet - some in NZ
  
  

Esther Woolfson lives in Aberdeen. She's a writer and fell in accidentally with birds. Her adoptions included:

• Doves in a doo'cot
• Bardie a cockatiel (her daughter's bird)
• A Rook called Chicken
• Spike the Magpie
• Ziki the Crow

She says living with birds was like marrying into another family, being introduced to a new society. Her book is full of her observations, but it is also full of the knowledge she amasses about these fascinating birds. There is a large bibliography and she wrestles with the things she learns - the intelligence of the birds, their capacity for feeling, whether or not they are happy or unhappy living with her. There are some wonderful stories - moving, heart-warming, stimulating - and some simply fascinating information for all those bird lovers out there. For example, the details of how birds fly and the historical envy humans have for this singular skill.

Signs of corvid intelligence:

• vocalising - Spike and Chicken can say words - especially Spike who can say his name and say 'hello' - one of his favourite curious sounds was 'eh?'
• caching (hiding) food in case of future need - or just to keep it - shows an ability to think ahead and to lie - Woolfson's birds hid things all over the house in holes in the wall, cushions, books.... and took great care over this
• reaction to the environment - the birds show fear of some things (men with ladders) but not others, they don't think their reflections are other birds but assume they are simply themselves (Woolfson refers to scientific research to confirm this), they consistently like some music (Schubert, Bach) but not other music (Benjamin Britten), they think black things such as rubbish bags are dead Corvids and react angrily or upset ... and so on
• feelings - woolfson is convinced corvids show empathy, joy, grief, mischievousness, anger - it's a controversial view and it is hard to measure this or to be sure but Woolfson can have no other explanation for what she has seen living with these birds - some literature says that without words there are no feelings but she asks why this should be so - this discussion in her book takes the reader (as much of the book does) away from birds and into a philosophical discussion on what makes us human
  
  

Woolfson writes simply and movingly about the business of living with birds. The formality of the rook who bows on greeting, caws 'good morning' every morning, preens carefully every night, who offers gifts with precision and care. There is wonderful humour e.g. the family never mentions James I to Chicken the rook because he decreed that all rooks should be killed. Spike is simply hilarious with his 'human' voice calling 'Spiky!' or yelling 'Hello!' down the phone to Woolfson's daughter.

She tells us other famous people - writers like her - have kept corvids. Charles Dickens had a pet raven and Truman Capote had a pet rook called Lola. The latter friendship is especially fascinating and wonderfully rendered in The Truman Capote Reader. Lola cached things inside The Complete Works of Jane Austen. Capote found all sorts of things in there including someone's car keys and the first page of one of his short stories - one he had abandoned because he couldn't find the first page. His grief on losing her is intense.

Oh, there is so much more from the history of birds (the discovery of the feathered archaeopteryx, the hummingbirds that are 30 million years old) to the beauty of flight and feathers. There is some exquisite writing about birds in the wild, and corvids in particular, and about Aberdeen and about the wider world of nature.

And were Woolfson's birds happy? She says they seemed to be happy in the way they acted, their health etc, and, as she points out, they were members of the family whom she believed she could read as well as her own children. As she also says, there were no other options for them as abandoned birds - in the wild they'd probably have died. In the end, Spike the Magpie becomes more aggressive and territorial and suddenly and inexplicably (and terribly sadly) dies. Why? Woolfson doesn't know, but suggests he needed more than she could give. Chicken, on the other hand, seems content with domestic life.

Of course any family living with birds or animals must be a bit mad - there are bird droppings, food cached everywhere, birds homes to clean, windows that must be kept shut - but by the end of the book I felt that we could all do with more of this sort of madness. People like Esther Woolfson are surely closer to where humans used to be - 'indivisible from the environment' - and remind us what we have lost.

This is a humbling book. A wonderful book. Highly recommended. And it's going off now to my friend Helen who has a blackbird nesting outside her kitchen window. She says I can go and see it. Any day now they expect the eggs to hatch.

Hummingbird

I discovered on passionate book blogger Bookman Beattie today the terrible news that due to the recession The Listener plans to stop publishing its weekly poem. Bookman flew into action and within hours had a reaction from Books and Arts Editor Guy Somerset who gave a considered explanation of why the 'agonising' decision had been made and promising, given the uproar (for uproar it has been) to try and revisit it. To see the full story, including comments from upset poets and others, go here.

Fingers crossed -and a plea to The Listener to do all it can to reverse the decision. The weekly poem is a tradition which has nurtured our greatest poets and continues to be one place up-and-coming poets know they can send their work.

Meanwhile Bookman has put his readers onto the weekly Guardian poem, and this week's is an exquisite poem about a hummingbird by Mark Roper. Apposite for me, given that I am currently deep inside Esther Woolfson's Corvus A Life with Birds [to be reviewed Thursday and I'll pop my notes up here.]

The poem begins:

Hummingbird

Not just how
it hung so still
in the quick of its wings,
all gem and temper
anchored in air;


not just the way
it moved from shelf
to shelf of air ...

And ends with the hummingbird 'quiet as moss', almost glowing, in repose. Which is where I'm at with Corvus is now - Woolfson is wondering about avian thought and emotions, and whether, without the language to name them, birds can think and feel the same way we do [more on that later.]

Reading Roper's Hummingbird, I go instantly back to my school days when I discovered D.H. Lawrence's hummingbird poem which evokes the opposite of the airy delicacy Mark Roper describes but goes, again, where Corvus goes too - recalling where birds came from, once.

Humming Bird
by D.H. Lawrence

I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.

Lovely, lovely poems eh? Where they take us...

Late Addition

After I wrote this post, I read this in Esther Woolfson's Corvus: 'The oldest passerine [largest order of birds often known as 'perching' birds] found in Europe, a hummingbird, dates from Oligocene, 30 million years ago. Named, originally enough, Eurotrochilus inexpectus, 'Unexpected hummingbird' ...'

Photo: Getty images

Bullet Points

*The winner of the Booker Prize this year is about to be announced. Whatever it is I haven't read it. I've usually assailed one or two of them, but not this year. Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago) is the one I am most attracted to but wonder if Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber) might not win? Although, I think it would be exciting to see first-timers like Aravind Adiga or Steve Toltz take it away.


I read Anne Enright's The Gathering purely because it won the Booker last year, although I was nearly put off reading it because it pipped a certain NZ author (sad but true) and because nay-sayers called it a depressing read. I picked it up at last because one of the judges said it had the best last line he'd ever read, and because reading the first two pages the prose struck me as exquisite. It was.


*This lovely book has arrived. I mentioned in my bird post on Monday that I was delighted to discover another writer/blogger Gondal-Girl across the ditch is reading this memoir. She, like me, is fascinated by birds. Already I am captivated by the cover of Corvus and the fine production by Granta. I'm reviewing it for National Radio on October 30 - the day after Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman and the day before Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Marianne Faithful.



*And while I'm on about birds again - here are the stunning velvet birds my friend Fifi makes which I also mentioned in the last post. They are simply lovely, and she says on her blog she has some left and will take commissions if the one you want isn't available.


*Meanwhile, Graham Beattie has graciously asked me how the Open Day went at the Randell Cottage for writers in Wellington on Sunday. As I explained in an earlier post, the historic cottage is home to NZ and French writers for six months each a year. In between writers, we open the doors for the public and for the cottage supporters. (I chair the cottage's Friends' group).


We also hope the Open Day might attract interested writers who want to try and imagine themselves working there. We are calling for applications for the NZ writer now.


So here's the report: It was an exquisite Wellington day with people swimming at Days Bay, and others visiting the last of the tulips at the Botanical Gardens up the road from the cottage. So you can guess we didn't get too many out-doorsy types, young families, or garden fans.


Our visitors were people who liked books, people who liked writing, people who liked historic cottages and Francophiles. Amongst them were City Councillor Ian McKinnon and a number of Foundation Friends of the cottage who donated money to the residency when it began seven years ago. They included NZ Books Abroad's Louise Wrightson, former diplomat now Nine-to-Noon-book-reviewer Bruce Brown, children's book reviewer and assessor Barbara Murison, and arts patron Jeanette Bornholdt. (The list of Foundation Friends runs to 30 people plus.)

Internationally recognised children's author Beverley Randell Price, whose family donated the cottage, was also at the Open Day along with a number of members of the Trust and its Friends committee. Cottage enthusiast and member of both the Trust and the Friends, Fiona Kidman, was on deck all day!

I turned up at 2 pm, nicely placed for the 4 pm drinks for the cottage's supporters. We were thrilled to be joined by composer Jack Body who is involved with the Douglas Lilburn House. One project the Friends' group is working on is to link the Randell Cottage more closely to the two other residencies in Thorndon: the Lilburn, and the Rita Angus Cottage, as well as the Katherine Mansfield birthplace. So watch this space.

Over and out (until the Booker results).

A book for the birds

One of those great travel shots of The Blue. This time in St Mark's Square, Venice, courtesy of Alan who is sharing the book with the locals, and Deb who snapped the pic after they'd been to the Rugby World Cup in France last year. The thing is the pigeons really do look rather taken with it. Unfortunately, there are no pigeons in The Blue, but there are multiple appearances by chickens, shearwaters (mutton birds), mollymawks, seagulls, and tui. I do, I confess, have a bit of a thing for birds.

See here:

It was the start of the day and the calling of the chickens. Lilian loosened the gate of the run and ducked her head to enter, giving a thin high whistle at the back of her teeth as she did. It was either that or the clang of the scrap bucket against the gate post, but by the time she looked up they were out of the hen house and running across the hard earth. It didn't take much, only the smallest whistle and the single knock of a bucket, and Lilian was besieged by birds.

Opening of The Blue [appropriately published by Penguin 2007]

MORE ON BIRDS: post updates [10.21 am/1.17 pm] - Australian writer Gondal Girl has blogged on birds too! I know she's interested in them and today (roll down her post a little) you'll see she talks about a book called Corvus by Esther Woolfson which looks at the connection between birds and humans. More strangely, I am due to review the book later in the month on National Radio [it hasn't arrived yet but I'm looking forward to it.] And Fifi Colston's lovely velvet birds are up on her blog. I covet one of those but missed out on her last exhibition, I see there's another one coming up...

And nothing to do with birds but equally fascinating, there's a post up on Vanda Symon's blog today about a writer session in Dunedin discussing the Burns fellowship and the place of Maori writing in literature. Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Renee and Rawiri Paratene were on the stage.